


Pretty Much Perfect

by Meatball42



Series: Rare Pairs [32]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Domestic Bliss, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Polyamory, Sedoretu
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:26:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5967388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meatball42/pseuds/Meatball42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve’s domestic bliss is almost perfect. There are a few small snags, but... that's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty Much Perfect

**Author's Note:**

> As explained by [apfelgranite](http://archiveofourown.org/users/apfelgranate/pseuds/apfelgranate):  
> Sedoretu are four-way marriages on the Planet of O, which appears in The Birthday Of The World by Ursula K. LeGuin. Society is divided into two moieties, called the Morning and the Evening. You belong to your mother's moiety, and you can't have sex with anybody of your own moiety. A sedoretu is a marriage comprised of a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. (The [fanlore wiki entry](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Sedoretu) has a little more detail, for those interested.
> 
> In this fic, I’m going with the comics canon that Natasha and Bucky knew each other in the Red Room and had a relationship there, hand-waving the Cap2 canon that she was born in 1984.
> 
> Also, yes I’m doing a sedoretu with three guys and a girl. Watch me twirl my rainbow flag in every obscure universe.

A cool wind makes the forest around Steve roar with the susurrus of leaves and branches and tall grass. What birds remain in the area in the late autumn cry out to each other. On the edge of his hearing, windchimes clack and ring: Natasha’s unexpected addition to their large cabin on the edge of the new Avengers HQ property. Even with his eyes closed peacefully, Steve can imagine the entire scene around him. He sighs in pleasure.

Steve carefully redistributes his weight on the hammock, curling up a bit tighter. The afternoon is no longer warm, but even the chill on his skin cannot shift Steve from the perfection that is laying here, safe and alone and content.

His life is pretty much perfect.

In a few minutes- maybe a half hour- he will get up, stretch, head back down the verdant path toward home. When he gets there, he will find Sam cooking dinner, and Bucky leaning against the counter and watching every movement Sam makes. Some nights, Bucky will help Sam by cutting up vegetables or preparing a glaze or a sauce, but mostly he watches.

Natasha could be most anywhere, from training by herself in another part of the woods, to napping on the back porch, to trading snark and intel with Stark by video chat up at the main facility. When she sees Steve, she’ll smile softly, which will make him go over to her, and she’ll take his hand. When they began working closely in D.C., she would only touch Steve formally, as one Evening was expected to treat their brother. Now, Natasha will kiss him on the cheek, or bump him playfully in the canteen. He’s never felt so accepted with another Evening.

When dinner is finished, Steve and Bucky will help Sam set the table. Natasha will vanish to ‘clean up,’ and appear just when everything is finished. Steve will steal a moment with Sam in the kitchen, nominally to thank him for cooking but mostly to hold him and kiss him deeply. Then they’ll eat.

Conversation runs a wide gamut. Yesterday, Natasha relayed Clint’s complaints and celebrations regarding little Nathaniel, two months old and already the apple of his father’s eye.

Sam talked about Pepper’s continuing efforts to finalize the new interior design for the Stark Tower penthouse, after it was destroyed a few days after the last Avenger’s mission. Sam narrated, unable to eat his food for laughing too hard, how Stark is insisting that Doctor Banner gets final say on the penthouse and lab design, since he talked Banner into the experiment that backfired and destroyed two floors of the tower before Jarvis could shut it down. Banner, meanwhile, is insisting that he has no acumen for decoration, and wants Pepper to choose everything. Pepper, meanwhile, sees the task as a burden, not a gift, and is becoming more insistent that Tony redesign everything, since she blames him for the mess in the first place.

Bucky, with a small smile overtaking his usual blank expression, chimed in that he doesn’t even know these people and he can tell they need another Evening. Stark, despite having an ego big enough for two, can’t balance them himself.

Natasha and Steve, the only pair to have spent much time with the Stark Tower Three, had both fervently agreed. Sam wondered how they hadn’t found a room to get it on in, in that entire Tower.

In his hammock, Steve smiles at the memory. Bucky is healing, speaking more every day. His sense of humor is returning, along with more and more memories of life before Hydra and the Red Room. Back when they first found him, Bucky would only let Sam close to him, instinctively trusting his fellow Morning despite the Winter Soldier’s Evening moeity and the confusion that stemmed from that. In the last few weeks, however, he has begun to come within arm’s reach of Steve and Natasha easily, without feeling the need to watch them.

After dinner, Bucky will go to bed. He sleeps a lot; although he often wakes up with nightmares, he tires easily, and will take naps during the day as well. Like Natasha, he revels in naps, seeming to enjoy the freedom and assurance of safety to drop off whenever and wherever he wants.

Steve, Sam, and Natasha will discuss Avengers business in the living room. After they recovered Loki’s scepter and Thor returned with it to Asgard, there haven’t been any incidents that required the attention of the entire team. While Clint is on paternity leave and Thor off-planet, the remaining team members, plus Sam and Tony’s friend War Machine, are building a new headquarters for the team on one of Tony’s properties in upstate New York. Beyond that, Natasha is liaising with the new SHIELD on various current events, and Steve and Tony are working together to plan out more broadly the direction they want the Avengers to move in. Sam is kept busy counseling Steve and Tony in turn to keep them from taking each others’ heads off. Updates and plans and squabbles and stories will keep them up for an hour or two, before it is time for bed.

The cabin has a living room, a mudroom, a connected kitchen and dining room, and four spare rooms. Right now, the four rooms are all being used as bedrooms. The room that is currently Natasha’s is a master suite, with space for a huge bed and several dressers. Her clothes, equipment, and personal items take up about a fourth of the space. Some nights, she will go to sleep there alone, while Steve and Sam retire to Steve’s room and show each other love. Some nights, Sam will follow her into the suite for the night, and Steve will touch himself imaging what they are doing, what it would be like to be there with them, with Bucky. Other nights, she will wave Steve in with her, and they will curl up together in the too-big bed and think about Sam and Bucky curled up together in Bucky’s room, just twenty feet away.

Once in a while, Bucky will act strange all day. Steve will see him out of the corner of his eye and tense, for an instant, at an unknown Evening in their house. Bucky’s interactions with Sam will be electrically tense, almost awkward, as their usual dynamic is spun on its head. Unexpectedly, Natasha will prowl around Bucky, circling him like a predator stalks prey, and Bucky will turn in response like he’s prowling back. Steve will be lost, when his usual fantasies about running his hand through Bucky’s fluffy hair or biting up his solid chest become almost repulsive. Whenever the Winter Soldier’s dark Evening moeity comes out, their little cabin heaves topsy-turvy like a boat on a tidal wave.

The first time it happened, Sam instinctively cleaved to Steve’s side, and they retreated to Steve’s room simply to cuddle. They held onto each other despite the awkwardness when they heard Bucky and Natasha doing a sight more than cuddling a few rooms away.

The next morning, Steve found the time once they were safely ensconced in the main facility to ask Natasha what the hell had happened the night before.

Faced with her partners’ unease, Natasha explained that when she and Bucky had met in the Red Room and they had fallen in love, they had done so as fellow Evenings. Stuff like moeity and gender, she told him pensively, are pretty meaningless when there’s only one person you trust or care about in the whole world. Steve hadn’t had a response, but since then he’s made an effort to be more understanding when Bucky has Evening days, and when Bucky and Natasha have Evening  _ nights _ .

As much as he tries, however, it isn’t easy. At first, Bucky shied away from him in favor of cuddling Sam. Then, he would make love to Natasha but barely smile at Steve. Even though he’s still reticent with Natasha most of the time, Steve feels frustrated at being the only one of their partnership unable to connect with his former best friend. As the person closest to understanding Bucky’s experiences, Natasha has told Steve, wryly, that he’ll move at his own pace and no one else’s. Sam, as a therapist, advises Steve to be patient. Tony, as Tony, says that Steve is living with three smokin’ individuals, and he has no excuse for being this cranky.

It’s just hard, Steve thinks, shifting on the hammock, the wind biting more sharply into his skin. It’s hard to come home to see Bucky napping with Natasha, or laughing with Sam, and then watch his carefully controlled responses whenever Steve talks to him, or walks near him, or exists nearby. Steve has lived through a lot of things that hurt him deeply, without complaint, and no doubt he’ll live through more, but nothing has hurt exactly like watching Bucky flinch away from him.

The wind in the trees doesn’t sound soothing anymore. Steve opens his eyes. The sky has gotten grayer, darker. The wind has picked up, tossing the treetops to and fro. Most of the birds have vanished, and those that remain fly quickly back toward their nests. Nature is taking a deep breath.

Steve feels one with the hammock. Although he can sense the icy raindrops approaching, at this moment he would rather lay here and let them drench him than return to the cozy cabin he’s made into a home with his prospective bondmates and watch them all get along better without him.

He sighs.

“Better not be asleep.”

Steve flinches. Bucky is standing beside the hammock, his green-hazel eyes wary. Steve sits up slowly, like he doesn’t want to upset the hammock, trying not to startle Bucky. It’s when he stands up and Bucky doesn’t move back, that he finds himself inches away from his Morning fella’s face and sees that Bucky’s not wary, he’s nervous.

“Gonna take me home?” Steve says quietly, barely audible over the crashing of the wind around them.

A corner of Bucky’s mouth twitches. “Well, I’m not gonna carry you.”

Steve smiles back. “I think I can handle it.” He reaches out.

Bucky takes his hand and just stands there, looking down at their fingers twined together. When the first drops of ice pelt against their shirts, he shakes his head and tugs Steve toward the path to home. Steve lets himself be tugged, no longer feeling any reason to remain outdoors.

After all, his life is pretty much perfect.


End file.
